CMCBD News

SMWM + Slow Food Nation

7x7 Magazine
08/01/2008 12:00am
Leilani Labong

Amazing Grace
For this month’s Slow Food Nation, architect Cathy Simon designs the perfect meet-and-eat


On Labor Day weekend, thousands will descend upon San Francisco’s Civic Center for the country’s inaugural Slow Food Nation event—a four-day fete to celebrate the Bay Area’s brand of feel-good (organic, sustainable and oh-so-politically-correct) cuisine. Charged with the task of transforming Civic Center Plaza into the Slow Food Nation Marketplace, local architect Cathy Simon, principal at SF-based firm SMWM (you can thank it for renovating the Ferry Building into a food temple worthy of the Bay Area’s elevated culinary consciousness) approached the mission from a simple perspective. “Food is a common denominator for all people,” says the native New Yorker, who moved to SF in 1969 after graduating from Harvard.

The marketplace will feature a farmers market highlighting fresh produce from such Bay Area farms as Capay Organics, Dry Creek and Full Belly Farm; a Slow on the Go food bazaar offering everything from Vietnamese sandwiches from Charles Phan’s Out the Door to Indian street food from Vik’s Chaat Corner in Berkeley; two tap-water stations designed to reprogram our dependency on plastic bottles; a Soap Box for sustainability-focused rants; and picnic lawns for instantly gratifying, on-the-spot consumption. “Everyone’s gotta eat,” Simon says. “Why not do it in good company?”

The plan is anchored by a victory garden, a modern-day version of the WWII-era vegetable plot that was planted in the Civic Center to feed the residents of the surrounding neighborhoods, who were suffering from food shortages. “When my daughter, who’s now 31, was in the fourth grade, her class went on an excursion to the Civic Center, and all she remembered from the trip was that they saw a drug bust,” recalls the Noe Valley resident, who also had her hand in Alice Waters’ first edible school yard in Berkeley. “Our idea is to regenerate the area by reviving the victory garden and giving it an actual, palatable purpose.”

Simon’s progressive vision—which, incidentally, earned her the post of San Francisco jury chair for the History Channel’s recent City of the Future design competition—is just what the Slow Food Nation needed to reimagine the gritty Civic Center area. “Whether you think of it as a terrible or beautiful space, it’s a common ground, and everyone is entitled to feel part of the city’s food community,” says Simon, who also advocates for the rights of migrant workers: “Slow Food Nation celebrates the labor movement. The recent vilification of poor people from other countries—this anti-immigrant mind-set is ludicrous.”

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Visit here to learn more about Slow Food Nation.

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